The Devil & Daniel Johnston
So OK as I mentioned, this past Saturday I went out to see The Devil & Daniel Johnston out at the Belcourt, and well — wow.
The link tells you all about it so I won’t go too far into the detail, but basically Daniel Johnston is a musician, songwriter, and artist who’s been plugging away at it since the 80s or so. The catch is he’s a manic depressive who’s been in and out of mental institutions over those years.
So you can see why Ridley made the Syd Barrett connection, though I think it’s sort of a weak one. Syd’s musicianship and artistry were much more developed & skillful in the traditional senses, and his problems really didn’t kick in until after making the music (at least the Pink Floyd music for which he’s really known), and were largely made worse by his own LSD abuse.
Back to Daniel, it would be very easy to fall into the novelty trap, over-appreciating his work because of the illness or his “outsider” status. I’m sure some of his fans are guilty of doing so. And certainly his genius isn’t going to leap out to most people on a cursory listen. But I *do* think he is a genius. Between what I saw in the film & what I’ve encountered elsewhere, to me it’s like this –
He has produced VOLUMES of work. MOUNTAINS. And in so doing he’s produced an awful lot of crap. But the gems are there buried inside the crap. It’s just that, probably due to his illness, he has lacked one functionally critical ability, the ability to edit. MOST artists produce mountains of crap on the way to giving us the gems, they just know how to sort & fiter the work for themselves. Daniel has needed someone from the outside to go through his music, his lyrics, his spoken word, his artwork, his films, and even his very life itself, to compile it all and assemble it into one cohesive work.
Someone did, and that work is a movie called “The Devil and Daniel Johnston”.
A lot of his material seems to be available on CD now, and I’ve got the Welcome to My World compilation on its way to me from Amazon. I guess I’ll see how well it holds up outside the film context.
Your picture is still on my wall, on my wall
The colors are bright, bright as ever
Red is strong and blue is pure
Some things last a long time
Some things last a long timeIt’s funny, but it’s true
And it’s true, but it’s not funny
Time comes and goes
All of the while, I still think about you
Some things last a long timeYour picture is still on my wall, on my wall
I think about you often, often
I won’t forget all the things we did
Some things last a long time
Some things last a lifetime
Some things last a long time
Some things last a lifetime
Personally I’ve had enough first hand experience with just mild symptoms of ordinary clinical depression to know that we’ve gotta give this man props simply for surviving. That he managed at the end of the day to actually accomplish what he set out to do is absolutely inspiring.
